The simple premise of this book is that the purpose of education is to serve the well-being of students. Well-being might seem to be an obvious aim for education, but it has been given insufficient attention and often is poorly understood. Karl D. Hostetler asks: What does it mean for a human being to live a good life, to experience well-being? How, as individuals and a society, can we debate and evaluate the quality of lives? What classroom practices would be conducive to furthering the welfare of our students? Hostetler explores how teachers can "seduce" students' souls, guiding and provoking while still respecting individuals' rights to conceive and live a fulfilling life for themselves. He prompts serious reflection about the purposes of education and challenges dominant ideas about the aims of education, the politics of policy-making, and the practice of teaching. Seducing Souls argues eloquently and provocatively for the necessity of experiences that touch the soul, that elevate the young self so that students can better understand life and discern value.

A philosophical exploration of the concept of well-being that argues for its importance in education and provides teachers with strategies for its encouragement and nurturing.

The Jezebel spirit has spellbinding powers. Jezebel is a spirit, not a gender.

'Satan screamed out of agony, blaspheming the God of the heavens. His heart was destroyed...'With the world in chaos and the one true God forgotten, citizens of every nation fall under the misguidance of the one cast down from the heavensa "Satan. Assuming the name Mick, the devil sits in a throne above all others, giving a mark to all who pledge their allegiance to him as their so-called god; without it, families starve and suffer. While non-believers live fluently but in peril of eternal damnation, Mick's servants work diligently to make him happy as they recruit new followers. Mick's mercurial personality wins over several God-fearing humans, even the young and beautiful Tonya. She lives in turmoil as she finds herself falling in love with the one she was taught to hate. But Tonya isn't the only one anxious. Fear is present everywhere, even for Mick, who knows his time is running out. Soon God will return and call him out on the lies he has sold to the world. The last days draw near, and an almost human Mick spins out of control as he creates a web of deceit and destruction for all. But it is Mick who faces the ultimate betrayal in Seduction of the Antichrist."

The Seduction of Pessimism in the Novel: Eros, Futility, and the Quarrel with Philosophy explores the novel as a response to the Platonic myth that narrates the rift at the core of our being. Eros is supposedly the consolation for this rift, but the history of the novel documents its expression as one of frustrated desires, neuroses, anxieties, and cosmic doom. As if repeating the trauma from that original split in Plato—a split that also divides philosophy from literature—the novel treats eros as a site of loss and grief, from the medieval romances to Goethe, Emily Brontë, Proust, Mann, Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Nabokov. The pessimism that emerges from this eros, tells us something fundamental about who we are, something that only the novel can say. At a time when both education and leisure are increasingly ignoring the novel’s imperative to sit with ambiguity, complexity, and contingency, and as we are hurtling toward a bleak future of climate catastrophe and political instability, the novel is one of the last bastions of humanity even as it is quickly being eroded.